News & Events: January 6, 2020

In this issue:

• Sowing the Seeds of Sustainability Leadership
• Call for Abstracts - 2020 Maine Sustainability & Water Conference
• Upcoming Sustainability Events
• Mitchell Center Shorts

Sowing the Seeds of Sustainability Leadership

It’s very encouraging to see Mitchell Center students and faculty join forces with stakeholders to address important sustainability challenges. Because of the thorny nature of these challenges, however, quick fixes are often hard to come by. For that reason, we also support their efforts to develop leadership capacities that will help them remain engaged in these collaborations and find lasting solutions.

It’s an ambitious goal, but we’re making progress on multiple fronts.

• An interdisciplinary team of faculty received a major grant to train a new generation of conservation leaders. See the article 'Training Conservation Leaders'.
• Several members of our Future of Dams team (see related article) led a series of workshops to help NOAA work more effectively with diverse stakeholders during the dam relicensing process.

• Senior Fellow Linda Silka and I helped train a research team led by the Univ. of Delaware focused on water-related sustainability challenges as they begin work on a $20 million NSF grant.
• I collaborated with leaders of innovative sustainability programs from six continents on a paper in Nature Sustainability that identifies strategies for training future leaders of sustainability programs in universities and non-governmental organizations, based in part on creative approaches developed by our researchers.

Of course, none of these efforts is sufficient to address the many sustainability challenges we’re facing. Taken together, however, they are growing the supply of dedicated, collaborative and capable leaders – that all-too-scarce but indispensable resource for creating a brighter environmental, social and economic future.

David Hart
Director